Image surveillance systems have been widely applied to various occasions, such as security applications (financial institutions) and manufacturing applications (factories). The scale of the image surveillance system is extended from a single hop to multi-hop, or even a real-time image surveillance system in various zones. As for the international enterprise, the image surveillance system must satisfy the real-time monitor and recording over different time zones and different zones all over the world.
From the point of view of the enterprise, a good real-time image monitor and recording system preferably has scalable flexibility. That is, when the scale of the enterprise rapidly extends, a good real-time image monitor and recording system may be scaled therewith.
The main key function of the real-time image monitor and recording system resides in the image privacy, the ease of read in either the real-time monitoring condition or the recorded video watching condition, the easy operation, and the easy system maintenance.
In the conventional analog image monitoring and recording system, the security level is low, i.e. the video tape can be easily taken away or damaged. In addition, it takes a lot of time to send the video tape to a remote site, so it is inconvenient. The scale of this conventional analog image monitoring and recording system cannot be easily enlarged. More particularly, this conventional analog image monitoring and recording system tends to be influenced by the human's improper operations. For example, a wrong video tape may be placed into the video recorder, the date and the location of the video tape may be incorrectly labeled, or the video tape may be incorrectly classified.
An improved image monitoring and recording system had been proposed to improve the prior art drawbacks. The system can establish the individual surveillance servers according to different camera groups, or may group the analog cameras into one group and then encode their output signals into digital signals to facilitate the management and storage. In addition, the user interface is simple because the image view site of the user is separated from the image storage site.
However, if the image file information is stored in an image database, then the response speed of the system may be slowed down due to that the stored data is severely increased.